Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer messaging and more particular to message prioritization in a message folder.
Description of the Related Art
Messaging is the lifeblood of the Internet. The ability for different users geographically dispersed about the globe to exchange messages instantaneously and to universally read those messages irrespective of the type of computer involved has enabled the explosive growth of computing worldwide. Messaging generally includes not only traditional, asynchronous forms of communication including e-mail, discussion forums, blogging, wikis, shared calendaring and tasking, but also synchronous forms of communication including instant messaging, group chats, and the like. Irrespective of the mode of messaging, however, that remote individuals can instantaneously communicate provides the pulse of modern computing.
The ease in which end users can compose and transmit messages to others in an instantaneous fashion is not without consequence, however. Whereas traditional forms of communication—namely the telephone, facsimile and postal service—required some effort on the part of communicants, composing and transmitting a message like an e-mail or instant message requires little effort. Accordingly, the volume of messages traversing the global Internet each minute far exceeds by orders of magnitude those messages transmitted using traditional methods. As a result, entirely new management tools are required to manage the sheer mass of messages end users receive and process each day.
For casual users of messaging, message management can be limited to sorting a view of an inbox for inbound messages. Yet, for advanced users—particularly corporate users—the constraint of the physical size of the view inhibits the ability to see all messages so as to permit manual management of messages through sorting. The problem of message management can be compounded when the number of messages to be managed sums to the hundreds and thousands. In the latter instance, an end user may require days to process each message resulting in a lapse of communication comparable to that of pre-Internet, traditional messaging—the very problem sought to be overcome by Internet based messaging.
To address the problem of message management for a large volume of messages, tools have been developed to prioritize messages either manually or automatically. Once messages have been prioritized, the messages can be sorted in a view to the messages so that the messages of highest priority can appear within eyeshot of an end user. Consequently, the end user can process those messages of greatest importance first, leaving those messages of lesser importance for later processing. Most tools permit the classification of messages by numerical priority, and advanced tools perform prioritization according to the identity of the sender of the message, the time of receipt of the message or keywords in the subject line of the message.
Recently, message management systems have combined different prioritization criteria for automatically sorting and/or filtering messages wherein each of the criteria can be manually weighted by the end user to express a preferred balancing of application of the criteria to inbound messages. Exemplary criteria include whether or not the sender is recognized as an entry in the address book of the recipient, the priority of the message as established by the sender, the extent of participation of the recipient in a thread associated with the message (known as thread participation), and whether the message recipient was designated as the direct recipient, or as the recipient of a carbon copy or blind carbon copy (known as message directness). While the foregoing criteria can be important to many users, in the organizational and social context, the criteria cannot properly prioritize a message according to the relative importance of the message in a social collaborative structure of messengers.